About Us

Flight Science is building next-generation operations software for the airline industry. Our mission is to give flight operations teams real-time, intelligent tools that improve efficiency, communication, and decision-making. Our first product uses real-time flight tracking, weather, and airspace data to power in-flight optimization, delivering recommendations to pilots that save fuel, avoid turbulence, and reduce delays.

Role Overview

2026 is a year of massive scaling for Flight Science. Following a successful year where we closed both our pre-seed and seed rounds, we are well-capitalized and ready to expand our product suite for major airline partners.

We are looking for a Senior Rust Backend Engineer to take a significant, highly visible role designing and developing our backend systems and infrastructure. You will build and maintain performance-critical services that power low-latency APIs and real-time data pipelines for dispatchers, pilots, and airline operations centers. Additionally, you will help shape our cloud infrastructure, deployments, and release management, ensuring that our mission-critical systems are deployed safely and scale seamlessly as our customer list grows.

As an early, senior member of the team in Los Angeles, you’ll work from our new office in West Hollywood and enjoy excellent benefits, including unlimited vacation time, a company-wide year-end holiday, and a meaningful share of equity.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Execution: Take full ownership of the backend development lifecycle, allowing leadership to move from daily execution to high-level architectural strategy.
• Build for Scale: Develop and optimize microservices in Rust that underpin real-time airline operational systems.
• Data Engineering: Design and implement robust data integration pipelines, including streaming components and stateful WebSocket-based communication.
• Performance & Reliability: Maintain high-stakes systems where low latency and correctness are non-negotiable for aviation safety and efficiency.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Manage and scale services within our AWS environment, ensuring high availability for our global airline customers.

Requirements

• Senior-Level Rust Expertise: Significant commercial experience writing and maintaining high-performance Rust code in production environments.
• System Architecture: Proven track record of building microservices and request/response APIs that serve high-traffic SaaS applications.
• Infrastructure: Deep experience with AWS and a working understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Data Fluency: Strong experience in data integration and data engineering, with the ability to handle complex, real-time data sets.
• Product Ownership: A mindset for ownership—you are comfortable leading technical initiatives, making design decisions, and delivering features end-to-end.

Preferred Qualifications

• Real-Time Systems: Experience building stateful WebSockets APIs and streaming data architectures.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Familiarity with tools like CDK, CloudFormation, or Terraform.
• Aviation Domain: Previous experience in aviation or a personal passion for the industry (e.g., a pilot certificate) is a huge plus.
• High-Stakes Environments: Experience building systems where performance and reliability directly impact physical operations or safety.